Almost two years after launching a website featuring profiles of individuals being sought for deportation, the Canada Border Services Agency is wrestling with how to keep it going.

Internal memos show that staff consider the criteria for who to put on the site to be “too restrictive” and that they need to be expanded, but they can’t quite figure out how.

The program faces other “challenges,” according to the records obtained under access-to-information laws, including complaints by privacy watchdogs and litigation by people who have appeared on the website.

Started in July 2011, the Wanted by the CBSA website initially listed 30 people with active Canada-wide warrants for removal from the country. They had previously been found by immigration authorities to be inadmissible to Canada on grounds of suspected involvement in crimes against humanity and war crimes abroad.

Since then, the site has expanded several times to include individuals deemed inadmissible for other reasons, such as links to organized crime or for committing serious crimes in and outside Canada.

According to the site, 40 individuals have been located and 29 have been removed from the country. Another six individuals have been located abroad.

While public safety officials have touted the most-wanted program as a success, CBSA regional staff have had “difficulties” finding cases that match the program’s selection criteria.

“As a result, the number of referrals has significantly decreased since the program was launched,” said a briefing note prepared for agency president Luc Portelance earlier this year.

When federal officials announced last December that 85 Romanian nationals were believed to have entered Canada illegally as part of a human-smuggling operation — and that some of these “irregular arrivals” were missing — CBSA staff considered a proposal to add those missing individuals to the most-wanted list.

But the idea was ultimately rejected, memos show, because all 85 individuals had pending refugee claims, none had yet to appear for an admissibility hearing and none had removal orders against them.

Memos show that CBSA staff have considered expanding the selection criteria for the website to include cases of individuals who escaped CBSA custody or who had warrants against them because of failure to appear at an admissibility hearing.

But none of those changes have been adopted either.

“The focus of the program remains locating and removing individuals subject to an active Canada-wide warrant for removal and are inadmissible to Canada” on security grounds, serious criminality and suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity, said Esme Bailey, a CBSA spokeswoman, in an email.

Keeping the site “replenished” isn’t the only challenge the program has faced.

A synopsis of the program’s challenges and successes prepared by CBSA staff includes a section titled “lessons learned.” The first bullet point states, “Avoid labelling individuals (i.e. “war criminals”).”

Asked if this was an acknowledgement that officials may have gone too far in how they labelled certain individuals when the program rolled out — critics complained that posting the names and photos of suspected war criminals was unfair and went against the presumption of innocence — CBSA officials wouldn’t say.

“From an immigration perspective, a ‘war criminal’ is someone who has been found inadmissible by the Immigration and Refugee Board based on reasonable grounds to believe that they were involved in war crimes or international or human rights violations,” Bailey said.

Memos show that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada wrote to CBSA officials last September to ask why personal details of individuals remained archived on the site even after the site showed that they had been “apprehended.”

In its response, the CBSA said it was important to communicate to the public the effectiveness of the program but agreed to remove profiles of apprehended individuals after about 30 days.

The program has also come under scrutiny in the courts. Last December, a federal judge ruled that Arshad Muhammad, a suspected foreign war criminal facing deportation, should have his case re-examined by immigration authorities because of concerns that publicity stemming from the website could make him a target of mistreatment or torture in his native Pakistan.

But an internal CBSA document outlining questions and proposed answers related to the website states that “we are confident that the Wanted by the CBSA program does not hinder our ability to remove these individuals” and that “we have carefully considered all aspects of publishing their profiles on the web page.”

Lorne Waldman, Muhammad’s lawyer, said Monday a decision is still pending.